How to Sell Your Diamond: A Keyword Love Story
(aka: “How to Sell Your Diamond & Ram SEO Words and Terms into an Article”)
Let’s take a moment to drum up some hypotheticals, shall we? First, we’ll say that you have a diamond ring and you want to get rid of it/sell it quickly. It’s an engagement ring, from your first marriage. The diamond still looks like it will last forever, even though the holy union only lasted 7 months. So what are the logical options? You can obviously take it to your local pawn shop for a very speedy exchange of goods for funds. The only problem here is that you are going to get GOUGED on the price. The pawnbroker has to take your diamond ring and resell it in order to make any sort of profit (obviously he/she wants to make the most money possible – this is America, darn it.) So if you don’t mind getting back around 10-15% of what the diamond ring is worth, this might be fine for you. Remember, you a) just want to be rid of it, and b) you didn’t even pay for it in the first place.
Ok, maybe in this imaginary scenario, you actually want to make the most money you can. After all, you put up with a lot of nonsense over the last seven months and feel the need to be compensated (at least for your time, and since time = money, you want to find a lucrative, non-pawny outlet). So, you have a flash of insight and remember that we live in the 21st century; you promptly get online. You type in to the search engine of your choice: “How to sell my diamond.” Whoa. There are actually a ton of options. Hmmm…which to click on first… Well, the first three sites that come up all have a little yellow icon next to them that say “Ad.” Another ‘hmmm’… Do you trust these sites/companies? I mean, it’s clear they are paying to be listed first like that, so maybe they are not to be trusted. On the other hand, if they can afford “first page” advertising like this, maybe they are doing something right as an organization and are actually reputable. But wait…what if they are just really good at scamming people, and that’s why they have all this advertising money?? Arghhh. Ok, so you just skip those ones and click on a site link that has the most aesthetically appealing words in their title (ie: “Selling Your Diamond the Smart Way”). All right, this one looks pretty decent, you think; it’s easy to understand what is going on here. “Oh look, there’s a button I can click on that will give me an “instant, free appraisal” of my diamond jewelry.” Sweet. So you click it and it directs you to a page asking you for some basic info about your diamond (what its size is (carat weight), the color and clarity grades, if you have a certificate…your diamond’s favorite film, go-to date spot, and if it were a cocktail, which one would it be). You enter all this info (well, you enter it ‘to the best of your ability’ – over half of it you just make up because you don’t know or remember) and hit “return.” BAM! They hit you back with an immediate estimate. Not bad! Way more than the pawn shop was offering…
Too bad this ‘estimate’ is intentionally, grossly inflated. The goal here is to just get you to send your diamond ring in to them, so they can get it in their costive and prolonged “bait and switch” system (where they feign sincerity as they say “So sorry, but that estimate was based on what you initially claimed the diamond was; it’s actually a piece of poo and we can only give you $4.”) They hope to exhaust you to the point that you eventually just break down and accept an offer…that is way, way less than their original “estimate.”
The reality is that every company online that purchases diamonds is doing the same thing that a pawn shop is doing. They are buying your diamond, with the ultimate goal of reselling it. Ergo, they want to buy your diamond at a very low price.
Every company that is…except one: Diamond Lighthouse. We DON’T BUY diamonds. We help people sell them to a network of professional diamond dealers and buyers. We take a commission from the sale (10% on diamonds 1 carat and over), so we obviously want the each person to make the most money on their sale – because that is how we make money too. It’s the first business model that is actually fair to the person who is selling their diamond.
Phew. That was a lot of hypothetical (and also some very real) information.
Now on to the next topic. How do you squeeze a bunch of keywords into the content on your site? Well guess what? WE JUST DID. There are tons of keywords layered in to this article. Can you spot them??
Companies that conduct any sort of business online (which is maybe a lot of them?) utilize something called “keywords.” When you type in “How to Sell My Diamond”, each of those words is individually categorized as a keyword. The more popular a word, the higher its value is. That means if a lot of companies want to feature the word “Sell” on search engines, the price of using it in a paid ad rises. These are called Adwords. Anyhoo, you can either pay to put these up on ‘the Google’ or Bing, or you can “organically” imbed them in the content on your site. Say you have a blog and you feature a keyword in it numerous times, your site can then organically (like Whole Foods kale) pop up in a search. So when you type in “Where is the best place to sell diamonds online?” and a site that features those words appears (like this one!), that is an optimal use of keywords.
THIS IS SO META.
Hence the term “meta-tagging.”
So, in conclusion… “Where is the best place to sell a diamond ring online,” “How to sell diamond jewelry for the most money,” “How to ___ by selling your diamond,” and of course “Where to sell my diamond.”
-Joe Leone
